RADAR

The Society of St Pius X Is Excommunicated

The Society of St Pius X has consecrated four bishops without the Pope’s mandate and has been automatically excommunicated.

BY Justin McLellan | Vatican Correspondent of NCR

FOR MONTHS, tensions had been building between Rome and the Society of St Pius X, an ultraconservative Catholic group known as the SSPX that rejects several Church teachings and reforms which it claims have been tainted by modernity.

Those tensions came to a head on 1 July 2026 in the rural Swiss Alps, when the SSPX consecrated four new bishops for the society on the grounds of its international seminary in Écône, despite repeated Vatican warnings that doing so without the pope’s approval would result in excommunication for those involved. The SSPX claims to have more than 750 priests worldwide and 1,500 members including brothers, oblates and religious sisters active in 77 countries.

Breaking months of public silence on the looming rupture, Pope Leo XIV sent a letter to Fr Davide Pagliarani, superior general of the Society of St Pius X, published by the Vatican the day before the consecrations, urging the group to turn away from committing what he called a “sin of extreme gravity.”

Organizers said some 16,600 adults attended the outdoor Mass outside the society’s international seminary, nestled in the Swiss Alps. After a half-hour procession, the four priests sat before the altar and swore an oath to “forever be faithful and obedient” to the pope and to “combat and pursue, to the best of my power, heretics, schismatics, and those who rebel against our Holy Father the pope and his successors.”

The presiding bishops, Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay—both of whom were excommunicated in 1988 after being illicitly consecrated as bishops, a decision later lifted by Pope Benedict XVI—did not have a papal mandate, which is customarily read aloud during a bishop’s consecration.

At the point in the liturgy when the mandate would normally have been read, an assisting priest instead pronounced a statement justifying the consecrations.

“From the Second Vatican Council to the present day, the authorities of the Church have been animated by a spirit that is contrary to that of the faith and have been acting against holy tradition,” the assisting priest said. “Therefore before God we consider it a sacred duty toward the holy Church, toward souls, to proceed with the consecration of bishops who are entirely faithful to her holy tradition and to her constant magisterium.”

Less than 24 hours after the ultraconservative Society of St Pius X consecrated four new bishops in open defiance of Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican declared that those bishops, the men who consecrated them and the priests and lay faithful who adhered to the schism, had been formally excommunicated from the church.

“Clerics and the lay faithful are warned not to adhere to the schism of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X, as they would thereby incur ipso facto the penalty of latae sententiae excommunication,” or automatically incurred excommunication, said Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, in a statement published just as the final Mass of the SSPX’s four-day mountain festival for the consecrations got underway.

The decision is a shockingly severe punishment from the Vatican and the pope, who has made church unity a hallmark of his pontificate, for a group which has long been a thorn in the side of Rome for claiming to be Catholic while openly rejecting Church authority.